Posted!

Join the Conversation

Comments

Welcome to our new and improved comments, which are for subscribers only.
This is a test to see whether we can improve the experience for you.
You do not need a Facebook profile to participate.

You will need to register before adding a comment.
Typed comments will be lost if you are not logged in.

Please be polite.
It's OK to disagree with someone's ideas, but personal attacks, insults, threats, hate speech, advocating violence and other violations can result in a ban.
If you see comments in violation of our community guidelines, please report them.

MEMPHIS—A mother and daughter from Honduras squeezed onto a bench in immigration court in Tennessee, awaiting their chance to talk to a judge about the girl's asylum case. The 12-year-old had come to this country because a gang killed the girl's uncle, the mom said. "They took off his head," she said in Spanish, and made a throat-cutting gesture.

The small courtroom was so full that they sat thigh-to-thigh with strangers.

Similar scenes play out across the country. The nation's immigration courts are packed, and that could slow down President Trump's plans for mass deportations.

People drive hundreds of miles to the Memphis Immigration Court, which has jurisdiction over cases in four states. Established in 1998, the court is handling more cases today than ever. Immigrants may wait years for a final ruling on whether they can stay in the country.

President Trump is pushing to have more people quickly deported without a court hearing.

Yet that expedited removal process often doesn't apply to immigrants who've been here more than two years. Many immigrants have the right to plead their case before an immigration judge if they're threatened with deportation, attorneys say.

That means any immigration crackdown would run into the existing bottleneck in immigration courts.

One of those cases is that of 12-year-old Angie Johnson Caballero. Her mother, Maria Caballero, 41, said the girl was a baby when she left her with relatives and came to the United States to earn money for the family.

Angie spent years in the care of her grandmother and the girl's uncle.

Then a gang cut off the uncle's head, the mother said.

The mother said the killing prompted her to send for her daughter. When Angie was 10 years old, the family hired a human smuggler to bring her to the U.S, but the trafficker abandoned the girl during the journey.

The girl continued alone, the mother said, until the Border Patrol caught her. Authorities detained the girl in Arizona for a month before releasing her to her mother.

Now the girl is going to a Memphis school, but a court has to decide if she can stay in this country permanently.

April 6, 2017 - Casey Bryant, director for the legal program at Latino Memphis, listens to a client during a meeting at the agency's office on Thursday. She represents clients in Memphis Immigration Court and says clients sometimes wait years for final rulings on their cases.(Photo: Yalonda M. James/The Commercial Appeal)

The surge in immigration from central American countries like Honduras that began in the summer of 2014 is one of the biggest reasons for the increased caseload at the Memphis Immigration Court, said Stacie A. Hammond, another staff attorney with Latino Memphis.

Many cases involving children and teenagers went before the judge in Memphis on a recent Tuesday, and the result of most was the same: the judge reset the case to another day and warned that if the immigrants didn't come back, they could be deported. In the case of the mother and daughter, the judge told their lawyer to file a formal asylum claim.

Then mother and daughter left the building and went back into the city, their future still uncertain. They're to come back to court in March 2018.

Reach reporter Daniel Connolly at 529-5296, daniel.connolly@commercialappeal.com, or on Twitter at @danielconnolly.